I’ve come to moisturiser late in life, but I’m already turning heads.
I was once a happy enough boy in a town ranged by fall-down drunks and musky geriatrics, all of whom abhorred personal hygiene as a type of space-age nonsense. If someone had bathed, you knew a morning had broken wherein they’d soon be grinning up at a magistrate trying to smell innocent. In that town, the rare scent of Palmolive Gold cried out, “I was elsewhere on the night in question, your honour.”
Mum made me carry a comb, and it weighed a ton. A smoking porch widow once called out to me that I was a sissy with my neat hair, though she had hot rollers in hers – scaffolding for what would become a towering beehive. For the male of the species, any type of grooming, then known as “dolling yourself up”, was seen as an underhanded way of putting yourself above your fellow man. A deceptive veneer was a form of subterfuge encouraged in women and forbidden for men. Men were supposed to happily look like shit. And mostly did.
So when I first saw a man moisturise I took refuge inside a hedge and fretted there all day, bewildered and queasy. My parents hadn’t prepared me for exotic extremes of human behaviour such as men moisturising, and watching this neighbour’s orbital application was as disconcerting to me as if I’d caught Mario Milano wriggling into a pair of bell-bottoms. Dad told me the man had been scalded by hydrochloric acid at the cannery, and that made me feel better. In Shepparton, we blokes didn’t moisturise. You’d have been thought some sort of gender-bending revolutionary if you did – the type of small-town Mao who inadvertently sighs while watching Rock Hudson on TV. We preferred our men to be onion-skinned and to flake and rustle as they chatted.
My daughters were coming around for my birthday dinner the other day, so I did all the things you do to keep your kids from knowing how f—ed up you are. I turned the volume down on the TV remote and lowered the heater’s thermostat, culled the use-by transgressions in the fridge, the flaccid celery, the gaunt corn, and the taramasalata that had, like Dezi Freeman, hidden festering in its remote container for so long.
Both women, without consultation, without arranging this as an ambush, gave me moisturiser for my birthday. Fancy moisturisers engineered for gentlemen. Lotion Apres-Rasage au Neroli Marocain. (In this age of versatile gender, if I identify as a woman tomorrow, should I risk using these? Or am I safer chucking them and getting stuff that works on women?)
The birthday turned into an intervention. About a dozen of mine have recently … booze, bad language, cynicism, lack of communication, etc – your adult kids can make any celebration a re-education camp.
This time, it turns out, I was guilty of having a dry face. My forehead was a Sahara and my visage a mirage. So, dutifully, obediently, shockingly, I have begun to moisturise. I’ve become a sort of late-stage looksmaxxer, with skills approximating those of an appalled mortician. The word “embalm” comes from the Latin “balm,” meaning a fragrant lotion made of resin and oils.
Sadly, the person who moisturises is subject to the same snowballing addiction as a heroin or meth user – you start off with a tiny dose and have to keep increasing it week by week to get the same effect you used to get from half as much. Now, every morning, I’m slathering my head with unguents like a hillbilly greasing up a hog for a county fair. I can’t stop.
I have become, like Adam in the garden after his apple, suddenly scaldingly aware, even ashamed, of my nakedness. To assuage this feeling, I must apply. About midday, again approximating parchment, I must reapply. I must give off a hint of bergamot, a whiff of root extract. I must glow.
I haven’t confirmed this, but it’s likely I’ve become gorgeous. I’m getting double glances, second looks, eyebrows are being raised at me by both sexes. I suddenly understand the burden of being George Clooney.
I know I should be happy being gorgeous. Yet I hear a rebuke in the lyrics of a favourite song, A Slight Discomfort, by The Hold Steady:
“Ain’t it sad about those metro guys, don’t it hurt to watch ’em moisturise?
They’re never funny and they’re all so afraid to die.”
I’ve listened to that song a hundred times, laughing at those “metro guys” for their greasy po-faced thanatophobia. I’m not laughing any more.
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Anson Cameron is a columnist for Spectrum in The Age and the author of several books, including Boyhoodlum and Neil Balme: A Tale of Two Men.
